Singer Serge Gainsbourg Promoted Incest and Pedophilia. Now He’s Being Honored.

When Serge Gainsbourg, one of France’s most influential singer-songwriters, died aged 62 on March 2, 1991, then-president François Mitterrand described him as “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire. He elevated the song to the level of art.”

Gainsbourg remains one of the country’s most popular musicians, who went on to inspire everyone from Nick Cave to Daft Punk, Massive Attack and De La Soul. But in 2022 the themes of incest, misogyny and racism in his music make him an increasingly controversial figure. For some, his transgressiveness is a quintessential part of French culture. To others, he is a symbol of toxic masculinity. On the 30th anniversary of his death last year, Les Inrockuptibles magazine asked if Gainsbourg had become problematic, and L’Obs wondered “can we still like him today?”

This spring, his daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg will open the doors of 5bis Rue du Verneuil in Paris as Maison Gainsbourg, the first cultural institution dedicated to the artist. The songwriter’s small house, where he spent the last years of his life, has long served as a shrine covered with posters, photographs and graffiti tributes. After a long wait, it was set to open to the public to mark the 30th anniversary of Gainsbourg’s death but was postponed due to COVID-19. Tours of the house will be accompanied further down the street by a museum, a bookshop and a café that turns into a piano bar at night. In a separate event, a new metro station on the edge of Paris will be named after him next year in honor of his song “Le poinçonneur des Lilas” (The ticket-puncher of Les Lilas).

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin Explore Their Complicated Past in ‘Jane by Charlotte’

Best known for his 1969 hit “Je t’aime…moi non plus,” banned by the BBC due to its explicit content and denounced by the Vatican, Gainsbourg was always a controversial figure. His penchant for provocation led him to record a reggae version of “the Marseillaise” [the French national anthem] and burn a 500 franc note live on TV to protest against high taxes. “Provocation seemed to be part of his arsenal, of the way he tried to make an impact, of the character that he constructed,” says David Platten, a professor at the University of Leeds who specializes in French popular culture. “And France as a country likes to appropriate some of its more radical kinds of artists.”

But while Gainsbourg still enjoys the aura of a glamorous icon as the “bad boy” of French music, some of his albums make for a chilling listen at a time when femicide is a growing problem in France. In the 1976 album L’homme a la tête de chou the narrator warns his lover Marilou to “watch out or I’ll beat you up,” until he finally kills her in a fit of jealousy. The album Histoire de Melody Nelson, widely regarded as his masterpiece, has parts that are equally disturbing.

In 1966, Gainsbourg persuaded France Gall, who was 18 years old at the time, to record his song “Les Sucettes” (Lollipops). She later said she hadn’t understood that the lyrics were about fellatio and said she was left humiliated by the experience. “It was horrible. It changed my relationship with boys. It humiliated me,” Gall told Le Parisien in 2015, calling Gainsbourg a “fat pig.”

Belgian singer Lio is one of the few people to have publicly called him out since the #MeToo movement. In September 2020, she described him as “the Weinstein of music” in an interview with Arte Radio. “He was a harasser, he was not at all cool with girls. I witnessed it,” she said. However, nobody has publicly accused Serge Gainsbourg of sexual assault or rape.

His behavior got worse in his later years, as he increased his intake of alcohol and cigarettes. In 1986, he appeared drunk on a TV program where he told Whitney Houston that “he wanted to fuck her.” The same year he called singer Catherine Ringer a “whore” because she had appeared in a porn movie. He put his bad manners down to the self-created character of Gainsbarre, a fictional alter ego that represented his dark side.

Jane Birkin, who was in a relationship with Gainsbourg for 13 years, defended her late lover and said he shouldn’t be judged against the standards of today’s #MeToo era. “You can’t judge things by other epoques,” she said in an interview with The Times. “You can’t measure them by this extraordinary state that MeToo has made.”

In her diaries published in 2018, Birkin describes scenes of violence at the time when she and Gainsbourg became France’s most iconic couple, such as one occasion when he slapped her “one, two, three times.” Bertrand Dicale, a journalist and author of the book Tout Gainsbourg, says “the fact that Gainsbourg beat his girlfriends, we’ve always known that. You had to be a complete idiot not to know that. Of course Gainsbourg was a nasty guy, but a lot of artists are.”

Towards the end of his life, Gainsbourg had several relationships with much younger girls and—in at least one reported case—an underage schoolgirl.

Many drew the line with Gainsbourg at the song Lemon Incest, which he sang with his daughter Charlotte, then 12 years old. The music video shows Serge lying on a bed shirtless with his daughter. “The love we will never make together is the most beautiful, the most violent, the purest,” she sings. Even at the time, it was criticized for glamorizing incest and pedophilia, but it still managed to spend 10 weeks in the French top 10.

Last year, the hashtag #metooinceste fuelled a reckoning over abuse of children in France, after prominent French intellectual Olivier Duhamel was accused of abusing his stepson. A year earlier, victims had spoken out against famous writer Gabriel Matzneff, who never hid the fact that he engaged in sex with girls and boys. Following the wave of allegations, French lawmakers passed a bill setting the minimum age of sexual consent at 15, in line with most other Western countries.

Talking about Lemon Incest with The Guardian in 2019, Charlotte Gainsbourg admitted that it would not be acceptable today. “My father would be condemned in every move he made. Everything is so politically correct. So boring. So expected. And everyone is so scared of what will happen if they go too far.”

Speaking to France Inter on the 30th anniversary of her father’s death, Gainsbourg said she still liked the song. “To me it’s very innocent. My father is playing with provocation, but he is extremely sincere and honest,” she said. “We had a very innocent father-daughter relationship. It’s what we say in ‘Lemon Incest:’ a love that is very pure and very beautiful.”

“I would like to sing it again and at the same time… it’s such a shocking subject,” she said.

In the wake of #Metoo, an older generation of women in France has defended the “freedom to offend” as essential to artistic freedom. For Florian Philippot, Marine Le Pen’s former right-hand man and leader of Les Patriotes party, Gainsbourg is a symbol of a “freer, more creative, more intelligent time than the current obscurantism,” he said in a tweet. He represented “a France which had not given up on being itself, and was loved for that in the world.”

As visitors step back in time at 5bis Rue de Verneuil, where everything has been left intact (an ashtray still contains Gitane cigarette butts)—Gainsbourg’s legacy will once again be up for debate.

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